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I fully appreciate that this is a sensitive matter. It's partly due to the after effects of the American civil war. Robert E Lee was a great Confederate General. You can't just airbrush these people out of history by demolishing their statues. Have statues of Lincoln and Grant and Sherman been demolished?

There is a similar sort of problem in Bristol UK at the moment where black people are urging the Local Authority to demolish the statue of the extremely rich slave owner hundreds of years ago, Edward Colston, who had a couple of schools named after him, and alms houses and a Concert hall They want the names changed, besides closing most of the libraries. Call me old-fashioned but leave it as it is I say.

There was another controversy when the Queen Mother unveiled a statue a few years ago to 'Bomber Harris' of RAF Bomber Command during the second world war. I think it's having a sense of history to have such a statue.

This is from the internet about the matter:

Quote:

Historian Madge Dresser from the University of the West of England tells the group, "The plaques on the statue demonstrate Colston's expertise as a trader and his charitable giving.
"But it's what the statue doesn't say that's so interesting.
"It doesn't say that a significant portion of his wealth was based on the labour of enslaved people."

What he didn't consider is the fact that non-capitalism makes people even poorer, and is correlated with even lower life expectancy, such that non-capitalism would kill much more than those 300K if it were the social system in the USA.
In turn, Caveman ought to have argued that capitalism, for pulling the poor up to higher levels of wealth and education than any sort of non-capitalism, actually SAVES lots of lives.

Great observation. I am a capitalist/business owner too, and occasionally work with Habitat for Humanity and church groups to help out others. The State also uses tax monies for a wealth of social programs, funded by us capitalist swine. The success of capitalists inarguably benefits those in need.

You can't just airbrush these people out of history by demolishing their statues.

That's not what the removal of the statues is meant to accomplish. It's simply a demotion of these individuals—and, by association, the ideals they stood or fought for—from places of honor.

Originally Posted by Henri McPhee

I think it's having a sense of history to have such a statue.

Nonsense. That's what history books and classes are for. For instance, Japan doesn't have a statue of a mushroom cloud or Truman at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, because statues aren't meant to symbolize the terrible things.

Hjalmar Schacht was an excellent central banker, Albert Speer an excellent urban planner, Adolf Eichmann an excellent burocrat, and the German Wehrmacht had many excellent generals - some historians consider it to have been among the best national militaries of the 20th century.

We don't keep monuments, streets or schools named after any of them, because clearly they all worked for an immoral regime and thus supported immense harm.

Hjalmar Schacht was an excellent central banker, Albert Speer an excellent urban planner, Adolf Eichmann an excellent burocrat, and the German Wehrmacht had many excellent generals - some historians consider it to have been among the best national militaries of the 20th century.

We don't keep monuments, streets or schools named after any of them, because clearly they all worked for an immoral regime and thus supported immense harm.

This is pretty straightforward, actually.

Should we change the name of the month "July" because it is named after a genocidal dictator?

__________________It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Aristotle

I fully appreciate that this is a sensitive matter. It's partly due to the after effects of the American civil war. Robert E Lee was a great Confederate General. You can't just airbrush these people out of history by demolishing their statues. Have statues of Lincoln and Grant and Sherman been demolished?

There is a similar sort of problem in Bristol UK at the moment where black people are urging the Local Authority to demolish the statue of the extremely rich slave owner hundreds of years ago, Edward Colston, who had a couple of schools named after him, and alms houses and a Concert hall They want the names changed, besides closing most of the libraries. Call me old-fashioned but leave it as it is I say.

There was another controversy when the Queen Mother unveiled a statue a few years ago to 'Bomber Harris' of RAF Bomber Command during the second world war. I think it's having a sense of history to have such a statue.

This is from the internet about the matter:

Military effectiveness aside, why celebrate a military leader who was fighting for...nevermind.

An excellent sign. I hadn't heard of that, do you recall where and when? And did antifa leave after the neos cleared out?

Not really. It was somewhere in the US (obviously) and I think the nazi group which showed up was "traditional worker party" or something, and one or two other groups as well. It's about all I remember, it just caught my attention because it seemed such an odd scene with the Trump supporters fraternizing with antifa against the fash.

__________________"Ideas are also weapons." - Subcomandante Marcos
"We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live." - Lucy Parsons
"Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!" - Mikhail Bakunin

Great observation. I am a capitalist/business owner too, and occasionally work with Habitat for Humanity and church groups to help out others. The State also uses tax monies for a wealth of social programs, funded by us capitalist swine. The success of capitalists inarguably benefits those in need.

In the US spectrum of things, I am certainly quite far on the left, and surely advocate wealth re-distribution to maintain social peace and indeed fairness. For example, I advocate the effortless base income for all. Or negative income tax for the poor, or whatever you want to call it: Realizing that our capitalist societies are a) so rich we can simply afford to pull the poor up and b) so empathic we really want to do it. Everybody has a right to use their skills and hard work to become rich, but I don't see there's a right to become super rich just because your money gives you leverage over those not so fortunate.

In my opinion, the US political system has a terrible flaw: It is open exclusively to the very rich. The richest 0.2% of the country choose 98% of all the candidates for political offices. This gives the office holders an extreme incentive to benefit those already rich, to the detriment of the middle classes and the poor. So change that system! Trump is a symptom of this cancer.

So there. Leftist enough for you?

Still, I am in favour of capitalism. Just keep the capitalists from buying the political offices, and wealth will be distributed fairly. That is my creed.

...it seemed such an odd scene with the Trump supporters fraternizing with antifa against the fash.

Militant left (of which the organized, activist antifa is a part) is often really just the other coin of naziism. The extreme left and right warp over backwards and pretty much meet at the ends, where they share common hatred: Against Jews, against capitalism, against democracy.

Hjalmar Schacht was an excellent central banker, Albert Speer an excellent urban planner, Adolf Eichmann an excellent burocrat, and the German Wehrmacht had many excellent generals - some historians consider it to have been among the best national militaries of the 20th century.

We don't keep monuments, streets or schools named after any of them, because clearly they all worked for an immoral regime and thus supported immense harm.

This is pretty straightforward, actually.

Says someone who has a Haus Spiess, named after a Napoleon lackey, just around the corner in his little kaff. LOL

Says someone who has a Haus Spiess, named after a Napoleon lackey, just around the corner in his little kaff. LOL

Ooh Putin's henchmen have my address - scary!

ETA: To call a communal clerk "a Napoleon lackey" is a little far-fetched, dontcha think? The main job was to secularize the state and introduce the Code Civil - both actually rather amazing, and utterly positive, improvements. Can you point out any harm that Mr. Spiess supported?

In the US spectrum of things, I am certainly quite far on the left, and surely advocate wealth re-distribution to maintain social peace and indeed fairness. For example, I advocate the effortless base income for all. Or negative income tax for the poor, or whatever you want to call it: Realizing that our capitalist societies are a) so rich we can simply afford to pull the poor up and b) so empathic we really want to do it. Everybody has a right to use their skills and hard work to become rich, but I don't see there's a right to become super rich just because your money gives you leverage over those not so fortunate.

In my opinion, the US political system has a terrible flaw: It is open exclusively to the very rich. The richest 0.2% of the country choose 98% of all the candidates for political offices. This gives the office holders an extreme incentive to benefit those already rich, to the detriment of the middle classes and the poor. So change that system! Trump is a symptom of this cancer.

So there. Leftist enough for you?

Still, I am in favour of capitalism. Just keep the capitalists from buying the political offices, and wealth will be distributed fairly. That is my creed.

Yepper. Lousy voter turnout and lack of political involvement by the poorer folk sends the dominoes falling in ways that a lot of people don't appreciate. Maybe the poor are genuinely too comfortable to get politically active? Asked only slightly tongue in cheek.

I think it could be argued that Caesar did many things as an Emperor, good and bad. Lee only had one real claim to fame.

I agree. Which goes to show that the removal of the statue from a place of honor is about more than it being about a person who "faught for injustice" and who "worked for an immoral regime that cause immense harm". That being the case, it's time cut that ******** and deal with the real reason people either support the statue or want it removed.

__________________It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. - Aristotle

The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma for its endorsement by the Oxford University Press style rulebook, is a comma used just before the coordinating conjunction (“and,” or “or,” for example) when three or more terms are listed.

Your "ideal world" sounds like a Brave New World dystopia where human history and culture is systematically scrubbed from the public mind. The tragedy is that you might be right.

Hehe I have just been accused that in my home town, a historic public building is called after its builder, who was "a Napoleon lackey" - a communal clerk during the time of French reign (ca. 1798-1813 - don't have the exact years by heart). And I just asked what harm the introduction of French rule actually did. Well, there is one: They introduced the French Revolutionary Calender, which is a pain in the butt for me, personally, as I have to do the conversions today, compiling the genealogy of my family.

Yep. Antifa are trying to stop a heinous ideology from spreading. They are meeting the neo-nazis on their own terms, so yeah, they are a little rough around the edges. But the neos are un-American, and even inhuman in a limited sense. Singing Kumbaya is not the move when confronting a white supremacist. And they are becoming openly accepted in a certain political party, and becoming more normalized by the day. I think it's significantly more acceptable for antifa to crawl down in the gutter with the neos. These two groups are not roughly equal but on opposite ends of the spectrum. One is textbook evil, and the other wants to reject that evil, By Any Means Necessary.

And so we learn from history, generations have to fight
And those who crave for mastery
Must be faced down on sight
And if that means by words, by fists
By stones or by the gun
Remember those who stood up for
Their daughters and their sons

__________________As human right is always something given, it always in reality reduces to the right which men give, "concede," to each other. If the right to existence is conceded to new-born children, then they have the right; if it is not conceded to them, as was the case among the Spartans and ancient Romans, then they do not have it. For only society can give or concede it to them; they themselves cannot take it, or give it to themselves.

I fully appreciate that this is a sensitive matter. It's partly due to the after effects of the American civil war. Robert E Lee was a great Confederate General. You can't just airbrush these people out of history by demolishing their statues. Have statues of Lincoln and Grant and Sherman been demolished?

There is a similar sort of problem in Bristol UK at the moment where black people are urging the Local Authority to demolish the statue of the extremely rich slave owner hundreds of years ago, Edward Colston, who had a couple of schools named after him, and alms houses and a Concert hall They want the names changed, besides closing most of the libraries. Call me old-fashioned but leave it as it is I say.

There was another controversy when the Queen Mother unveiled a statue a few years ago to 'Bomber Harris' of RAF Bomber Command during the second world war. I think it's having a sense of history to have such a statue.

This is from the internet about the matter:

Of course you can demolish the statues. That won't do a thing to remove them from history. We still have the battlefield parks, the memorials and bookshelves groan under the weight of scholarship on the Civil War. All getting rid of the statues does is put an end to honoring the criminals who committed the crime of treason. We can still read about their treason. We can still visit the battlefields where they perpetrated mass murder in furtherance of their crime. We just won't have these sick fetish objects celebrating the worst crime in American history blemishing the South.

I don't have your address, I just know that your kaff (which you told us about openly) basically has just one corner. And yet it was enough to find something pointing out the holier-than-you attitude of your post. Go to the next Friedrich-Ebert-Street to protest.

Your "ideal world" sounds like a Brave New World dystopia where human history and culture is systematically scrubbed from the public mind. The tragedy is that you might be right.

The inability of people to not grasp the difference between no longer celebrating something or putting it in a place of honor and prestige and "scrubbing it form the history books like Stalin did to Trotsky" never ceases to amaze me.

I don't mind General Lee being in history books and PBS documentaries. I mind an obviously intentionally heroic image of him carved in granite standing tall and proud in my town square as something to be celebrated.

There is an area between "celebrating" and "purging." Stop pretending there isn't.

__________________Hemingway once wrote that "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.

And so we learn from history, generations have to fight
And those who crave for mastery
Must be faced down on sight
And if that means by words, by fists
By stones or by the gun
Remember those who stood up for
Their daughters and their sons

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.

__________________"Ideas are also weapons." - Subcomandante Marcos
"We must devastate the avenues where the wealthy live." - Lucy Parsons
"Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!" - Mikhail Bakunin

Not really. It was somewhere in the US (obviously) and I think the nazi group which showed up was "traditional worker party" or something, and one or two other groups as well. It's about all I remember, it just caught my attention because it seemed such an odd scene with the Trump supporters fraternizing with antifa against the fash.

I can't seem to find one but is there/are there memorials to the victims of slavery. Here in the South we seem to have plenty of memorials to the criminals but I can't recall ever seeing a memorial to the victims of the crime. Prof. Google says there's a proposal for one and I suspect there might be one in the New African American History Museum on the National Mall (though it may be some years before you can get in without advanced tickets). It seems odd that there were millions of people held against their will, rapped, assaulted and sometimes murdered but no bronze statues memorializing them. However, in the South, you can't swing a dead Klansman without hitting a statue dedicated to someone who committed treason to keep people enslaved.

There is a Civil Rights Museum in Memphis on the spot where Dr King was assassinated. Would that count?

__________________Credibility is not a boomerang. If you throw it away, it's not coming back.

The night is black
Without a moon
The air is thick and still
The vigilantes gather on
The lonely torch lit hill

Features distorted in the flickering light
The faces are twisted and grotesque
Silent and stern in the sweltering night
The mob moves like demons possessed
Quiet in conscience, calm in their right
Confident their ways are best

The righteous rise
With burning eyes
Of hatred and ill-will
Madmen fed on fear and lies
To beat and burn and kill

They say there are strangers who threaten us
In our immigrants and infidels
They say there is strangeness too dangerous
In our theaters and bookstore shelves
That those who know what's best for us
Must rise and save us from ourselves

Quick to judge
Quick to anger
Slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice
And fear walk hand in hand...

YouTube Video This video is not hosted by the ISF. The ISF can not be held responsible for the suitability or legality of this material. By clicking the link below you agree to view content from an external website.